Multipermutation Codes in the Ulam Metric for Nonvolatile Memories

We address the problem of multipermutation code design in the Ulam metric for novel storage applications. Multipermutation codes are suitable for flash memory where cell charges may share the same rank. Changes in the charges of cells manifest themselves as errors whose effects on the retrieved signal may be measured via the Ulam distance. As part of our analysis, we study multipermutation codes in the Hamming metric, known as constant composition codes. We then present bounds on the size of multipermutation codes and their capacity, for both the Ulam and the Hamming metrics. Finally, we present constructions and accompanying decoders for multipermutation codes in the Ulam metric

Noise and Uncertainty in String-Duplication Systems

Duplication mutations play a critical role in the generation of biological sequences. Simultaneously, they have a deleterious effect on data stored using in-vivo DNA data storage. While duplications have been studied both as a sequence-generation mechanism and in the context of error correction, for simplicity these studies have not taken into account the presence of other types of mutations. In this work, we consider the capacity of duplication mutations in the presence of point-mutation noise, and so quantify the generation power of these mutations. We show that if the number of point mutations is vanishingly small compared to the number of duplication mutations of a constant length, the generation capacity of these mutations is zero. However, if the number of point mutations increases to a constant fraction of the number of duplications, then the capacity is nonzero. Lower and upper bounds for this capacity are also presented. Another problem that we study is concerned with the mismatch between code design and channel in data storage in the DNA of living organisms with respect to duplication mutations. In this context, we consider the uncertainty of such a mismatched coding scheme measured as the maximum number of input codewords that can lead to the same output

Evolution of k-mer Frequencies and Entropy in Duplication and Substitution Mutation Systems

Genomic evolution can be viewed as string-editing processes driven by mutations. An understanding of the statistical properties resulting from these mutation processes is of value in a variety of tasks related to biological sequence data, e.g., estimation of model parameters and compression. At the same time, due to the complexity of these processes, designing tractable stochastic models and analyzing them are challenging. In this paper, we study two kinds of systems, each representing a set of mutations. In the first system, tandem duplications and substitution mutations are allowed and in the other, interspersed duplications. We provide stochastic models and, via stochastic approximation, study the evolution of substring frequencies for these two systems separately. Specifically, we show that k-mer frequencies converge almost surely and determine the limit set. Furthermore, we present a method for finding upper bounds on entropy for such systems

Duplication Distance to the Root for Binary Sequences

We study the tandem duplication distance between binary sequences and their roots. In other words, the quantity of interest is the number of tandem duplication operations of the form x = abc → y = abbc, where x and y are sequences and a, b, and c are their substrings, needed to generate a binary sequence of length n starting from a square-free sequence from the set {0, 1, 01, 10, 010, 101}. This problem is a restricted case of finding the duplication/deduplication distance between two sequences, defined as the minimum number of duplication and deduplication operations required to transform one sequence to the other. We consider both exact and approximate tandem duplications. For exact duplication, denoting the maximum distance to the root of a sequence of length n by f(n), we prove that f(n) = Θ(n). For the case of approximate duplication, where a β-fraction of symbols may be duplicated incorrectly, we show that the maximum distance has a sharp transition from linear in n to logarithmic at β = 1/2. We also study the duplication distance to the root for the set of sequences arising from a given root and for special classes of sequences, namely, the De Bruijn sequences, the Thue-Morse sequence, and the Fibonacci words. The problem is motivated by genomic tandem duplication mutations and the smallest number of tandem duplication events required to generate a given biological sequence

Evolution of k-mer Frequencies and Entropy in Duplication and Substitution Mutation Systems

Genomic evolution can be viewed as string-editing processes driven by mutations. An understanding of the statistical properties resulting from these mutation processes is of value in a variety of tasks related to biological sequence data, e.g., estimation of model parameters and compression. At the same time, due to the complexity of these processes, designing tractable stochastic models and analyzing them are challenging. In this paper, we study two kinds of systems, each representing a set of mutations. In the first system, tandem duplications and substitution mutations are allowed and in the other, interspersed duplications. We provide stochastic models and, via stochastic approximation, study the evolution of substring frequencies for these two systems separately. Specifically, we show that k-mer frequencies converge almost surely and determine the limit set. Furthermore, we present a method for finding upper bounds on entropy for such systems

2014 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory The Capacity of String-Duplication Systems

Abstract—It is known that the majority of the human genome consists of repeated sequences. Furthermore, it is believed that a significant part of the rest of the genome also originated from repeated sequences and has mutated to its current form. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of constructing an exponentially large number of sequences from a short initial sequence and simple duplication rules, including those resembling genomic duplication processes. In other words, our goal is to find out the capacity, or the expressive power, of these stringduplication systems. Our results include the exact capacities, and bounds on the capacities, of four fundamental string-duplication systems. I

The Entropy Rate of Some Pólya String Models

We study random string-duplication systems, which we call Pólya string models. These are motivated by a class of mutations that are common in most organisms and lead to an abundance of repeated sequences in their genomes. Unlike previous works that study the combinatorial capacity of string-duplication systems, or in a probabilistic setting, various string statistics, this work provides the exact entropy rate or bounds on it, for several probabilistic models. The entropy rate determines the compressibility of the resulting sequences, as well as quantifying the amount of sequence diversity that these mutations can create. In particular, we study the entropy rate of noisy string-duplication systems, including the tandem-duplication, end-duplication, and interspersed-duplication systems, where in all cases we study duplication of length 1 only. Interesting connections are drawn between some systems and the signature of random permutations, as well as to the beta distribution common in population genetics